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Whois privacy did NOT increase spam volumes

Kevin Murphy, August 31, 2018, Domain Tech

The advent of more-or-less blanket Whois privacy has not immediately led to the feared uptick in spam, according to researchers.
Data from Cisco’s Talos email data service, first highlighted by security company Recorded Future this week, shows spam levels have been basically flat to slightly down since ICANN’s GDPR-inspired new Whois policy came into effect May 25.
Public Talos data shows that on May 1 this year there were 433.9 billion average daily emails and 370.04 billion spams — 85.28% spam.
This was down to 361.83 billion emails and 308.05 billion spams by August 1, an 85.14% spam ratio, according to Recorded Future.
So, basically no change, and certainly not the kind of rocketing skyward of spam levels that some had feared.
Cisco compiles its data from customers of its various security products and services.
Looking at Talos’ 18-month view, it appears that spam volume has been on the decline since February, when the ratio of spam to ham was pretty much identical to post-GDPR levels.
It also shows a similar seasonal decline during the northern hemisphere’s summer 2017.
Talos graph
There had been a fear in some quarters that blanket Whois privacy would embolden spammers to register more domains and launch more ambitious spam campaigns, and that the lack of public data would thwart efforts to root out the spammers themselves.
While that may well transpire in future, the data seems to show that GDPR has not yet had a measurable impact on spam volume at all.